Observations and reflections from Tibor R. Machan, professor of business ethics and writer on general and political philosophy, now teaching at Chapman University in Orange, CA.

Saturday, April 16, 2005

Column on Criticizing America

America Bashing Continues

Tibor R. Machan

No one is more prone to criticize the various levels and branches of theUS government than I am. My complaints, however, tend to focus on how ourpolitical institutions have departed from the best ideas on which thecountry was founded.

When you read most prominent mainstream newspapers and magazines?The NewYork Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The New York Review ofBooks, for example?these too often and sadly aim their criticism exactlyat those principles. It is when America is most American, one might say,that they pick on her.

Take as an example James Traub?s February 13, 2005, column in The NewYork Times Magazine, ?Freedom From Want.? It is a nasty little piece thatcalls into question America?s generosity toward those around the globe whoare in dire straits. As the tag line quotes Traub?which pretty muchsummarizes the piece??Our closest allies have put world poverty at the topof their agenda. Why can't Americans do the same??

Well, for starters, our closest allies haven?t put world poverty at thetop of their agenda?it is their governments that have made the decision tosend some of the money they take from their citizens in taxes to help someof the poor around the globe. This is a totally neglected distinction byTraub and others: confusing what governments do in the way of forciblytransferring wealth from their citizens to whoever government officialsthink should get the wealth, and what the citizens of a country supportout of their own pockets voluntarily, without being threatened with jailtime if they refuse.

And here in fact Americans as a whole come off as the most generouspeople on the face of the earth. I am not talking about the considerableforeign aid the government of the US is sending abroad, secured throughthe extortionist means of taxation (yes, Virginia, taxation isextortion?you pay or you go to jail). I am talking about the fact, notedpoignantly in a letter to The New York Times Magazine by Carol Adelman,Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, that while the US government sends$16 billion?still the highest absolute amount?as aid, ?This number,however, excludes American private giving of more than $43 billion, morethan double the government aid in 2003.?

What was Traub thinking? Why was he ignoring the facts that Adelmanbrought to light? What kind of journalist is it who considers only whatthe government coercively redistributes as ?giving,? while treatinggenuine, voluntary contributions as non-existent?

I think I have a clue here: Someone who is eager to denigrate America andAmericans; someone who is eager to discredit a society in which freedom isstill more important than coercion; someone who would rather have us allforced to behave as statists like us to behave rather than leave us governourselves. For such a person the virtue of generosity is meaninglessunless it is extracted at the point of a gun, just the opposite of howgenerosity ought to work among human beings.

Yes, while I am a fierce critic of US government policies, I confine mycriticism mainly to when that government undermines the principles ofindividual rights on which it was founded?the unalienable rights to life,liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, among others. But in continuing tosustain a legal and cultural atmosphere of voluntarism, many Americans arestill doing what distinguishes them from the rest of the world, actingfreely to do the right thing.

Whenever you encounter critics of the American system, please look out:If it is being put down for upholding the principles of individual rights,the critics are actually being anti-American in the important sense ofthat term, namely, turning against America?s central ideal. When thecritic employs the standard of liberty, then he or she is urging Americato be more like what it should be in the first place.